Grab Bag Studio is thrilled to present "A Painter and a Performance Artist walk into a Bar..." a collaboration with Long Beach-based artist and curator Virginia Broersma, facililated by GBS co-founder, performance art curator and artist Natalie Mik. The collaboration will kick off with a private dinner event that is followed by a public opening reception for a wall display featuring Broersma's latest paintings, drawings and sketches. Throughout the month of June, Broersma and Mik will work together to think about how their different art practices can connect through a process-oriented collaboration. The public opening reception will be held on June 3rd, 6:30 pm - 9 pm and the exhibition will be on view from June 5th to June 25th, 2017.

When Natalie Mik asked Virginia Broersma to show her work for an exhibition at GBS, both quickly realized that collaborating on a conversation-based project could be an interesting and challenging endeavor. As both artists who also work as curators, Broersma and Mik are interested in interdisciplinary dialogue. While Mik’s practice looks at art through the lenses of performativity, Broersma identifies herself primarily as a painter, yet through conversation, they found common ground with specific themes and motivations within their work.

"If we as artists are considering similar things, how do a painter and a performance artist collaborate/communicate? Is a translation needed between our mediums, and what would that be? If we are both dealing with (re)presentation but in different ways, what is the thing/idea/source we are representing - the thing we have in common perhaps?" (text from email exchange)

"A Painter and a Performance Artist walk into a Bar..." creates artistic modes and strategies to these questions. Over the month of June, Mik and Broersma will begin the process of collaborating or perhaps better put, figuring out how to collaborate. The rules have to be reinvented. There will be no set goals, no formalized expectations but more willingness to trust each other. A dialogue with an experimental spirit and an openness to listen to each other will over the course of the month be documented in the space with remnants, notes, ideas, and unforeseen materializations. The exhibition component of this collaboration features a changing wall display at Grab Bag Studio. The display is reflective of Broerma’s art making process with finished and unfinished work of hers. Using this as a device for the collaboration, Mik will track the process and move around the work arrangements to understand how the ideas in the works have been formed. Notes and sketches from their conversations will be added to the wall as well.

On Saturday, June 3rd, their process opens to the public and the local art community of Long Beach and beyond. Grab Bag Studio invites the public to join their conversation on how to collaborate. We will think about ideas of communication, cross-disciplinary work, how an idea materializes, how bridges are formed. Mik and Broersma found their common ground with themes surrounding the representation of the body and the collective archive and how these shape and define us as people. Diverse points of view and perspectives on these topics are invited and welcomed.

About Virginia Broersma:

Virginia Broersma lives and works in Long Beach and Los Angeles. Her primary focus as an artist is with issues surrounding the body and its representation. She has exhibited extensively in Los Angeles, as well in Tokyo, Berlin, New York, and Chicago among other US and international cities. Additionally, Broersma takes on select curatorial and writing projects that relate to her interests in the studio and in 2016 was jointly selected for the Emerging Curators Program at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). Broersma has been the recipient of several grants including funding from the California Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Puffin Foundation and was awarded a Community Arts Assistance Program grant from the City of Chicago, IL, which she received in both 2010 and 2011. Broersma is also a contributor to the Huffington Post Blog.